03/25/2025

Bridging Divides in Energy Economics

USAEE NEWSLETTER | SPRING 2025

BY R. DEAN FOREMAN | PRESIDENT, USAEE

It is a great honor to serve as President of the United States Association for Energy Economics (USAEE) in 2025. As a member and active participant in USAEE for more than 20 years, I’d like to offer some reflections on how I view our discipline and the organization’s role in its evolution.

In many ways, energy economics has never been more divided—fragmented by competing policy priorities and diverging methodological approaches. One of USAEE’s core missions is to convene objective conversations where principles and measurement provide common ground. In an era of increased complexity, where energy transitions, market uncertainties, and geopolitical shifts dominate headlines, the discipline of energy economics must be anchored by empirical rigor and analytical clarity.

USAEE’s mission is straightforward: to advance the understanding and application of economics across all facets of energy development and use—including theory, business, public policy, and environmental considerations. But bringing it all together requires cutting across disciplines. Without a shared commitment to objective measurement, energy economics risks becoming an arena for advocacy rather than insight.

Although my career has primarily been in the oil and natural gas industry, it began—almost by serendipity—in ExxonMobil Corporate Planning in 2002, deep in global energy modeling. I was fortunate to have excellent colleagues who were patient with someone transitioning from telecommunications forecasting and regulatory policy, where my grounding in networks and externalities provided a useful bridge. My interests in probabilistic modeling and programming enabled me to see the big picture, while the push to distill complex insights into visualizations that spoke for themselves was an excruciating but invaluable journey.

Today, in a post-pandemic world shaped by emergent AI and machine learning applications, energy economics is a discipline walking a narrow bridge—one that depends more than ever on analytics. Yet paradoxically, although the renewable energy sector has expanded over the past decade, the energy industry employs fewer economists than it ever has before. As organizations increasingly turn to engineers, data scientists, and AI-driven models for decision-making, the role of traditional economic analysis has been diminished. However, energy economics remains indispensable—if and only if it maintains its edge in precision measurement, modeling, and empirical validation.

This is where USAEE plays a critical role. By fostering dialogs based on rigorous analysis and evidence-based discussion, USAEE ensures energy economics does not lose relevance amid the noise of policy debates and technological disruptions. The discipline's viability depends on its ability to deliver clear, quantitative insights that stand the test of academic scrutiny and real-world applications—and measurement is our most valuable tool.

As I look ahead to my tenure as USAEE President, my goal is to reinforce this foundation—bringing together economists, policymakers, and industry leaders to share data-driven understandings of the energy landscape. Measurement isn’t just a skill; it’s the key to ensuring that energy economics remains a cornerstone of informed decision-making.

R. Dean Foreman (dforeman@txoga.org) is chief economist for the Texas Oil and Gas Association.